Fineman starts out by praising both the speech and McCain's willingness to deal with people such as, well, Fineman himself.But like a true hyper-partisan, Fineman then goes on to knock McCain for having voted to allow the measure to be debated in the first place. Given the similar and equally odd response of The Atlantic, another dependable organ of the ideologically purist left, this seems to be the standard way Democratic partisans are going to treat McCain's behavior. That response ignores the fact that voting to allow debate on the bill was the only way to make it possible to amend and fix the measure, and assumes with the partisan, doctrinaire assurance that only a true ideologue can have that the ACA as it exists is the best of all possible worlds, and that its flaws- like the number of working Americans it leaves uninsured because they make too much to qualify for government help but too little to be able to pay for health care without it- are either inconsequential or certain to be replaced by worse ones in any bill which might conceivably be passed.

Except it's unsustainable. We can't pay for it. It's inefficient; private insurance companies are opting out at an alarming rate. And again, it fails to do the very thing it set out to do: to make affordable health insurance available to all Americans.

Now, it may well be that the present Congress will be unable to improve on the ACA. There is both an ideological bias and a partisan imperative pushing the Republicans in charge of both houses to do something inhumane when it comes to health care, and the crazy thing about the situation is that it is almost certain to come back and bite the Republicans if they do. Their own middle and lower-middle class voters are going to be among those any bill this Congress is likely to pass is going to hurt. The Trump movement, as I've observed before, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. No movement gathered around the personality of a demagogue and lacking any kind of philosophical consistency or even coherence is going to be able to avoid finally alienating its own supporters.

But in order to fix the glaring holes in Obamacare, it's necessary to try. That the article trashes Sen. McCain for doing that- and only that- is merely further evidence of the irrational partisanship which has hamstrung the government when it comes to doing the very thing McCain and a handful of others have striven bravely, patriotically, and wisely to do in the face of all the partisan wheel-spinning: work together with those in the opposite party to compromise and actually get something done to fix the problems the ideological crazies on both sides love to rave about and divide us over.

Ms. Chamberlain, like me, voted for Evan McMullin in November. Like me, she holds no brief for Hillary Clinton or her agenda. But she cannot, as she put it, "throw roses at Hitler."

As I've said before, comparing Trump to Hitler strikes me as harsh. I believe that Trump is a power-hungry narcissist who exhibits disturbing signs of psychopathy, like Hitler. Like Hitler, he has stigmatized defenseless minorities- Muslims and undocumented aliens, rather than Jews- and made them scapegoats for the nation's troubles. Like Hitler, he has ridden a wave of irrational hatred and emotion to power. Like Hitler's, his agenda foreshadows disaster for the nation he has been chosen to lead.

Evan McMullin has devoted most of his post-college life- even to the point of foregoing marriage and a family- to fighting ISIS and al Qaeda and our nation's deadliest enemies as a clandestine officer for the CIA. He has done so at the risk of his life.

He has seen authoritarianism in action close-up. One of his main jobs overseas was to locate and facilitate the elimination of jihadist warlords. Evan McMullin knows authoritarians.

And when he looks at Donald Trump, what he sees is an authoritarian like the ones he fought overseas. He knows Donald Trump. After leaving the CIA he served as policy director for the Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives. He tells about his first encounter with The Donald in that role in this opinion piece he wrote for today's New York Times.

In fact, when Mitt Romney and Tom Coburn and all the others who were recruited to run as a conservative third-party candidate against Trump and Hillary Clinton backed out, McMulli…

This is a great idea for three reasons. First, private enterprise is the future of space exploration, and as far as I know we will be the first spacefaring nation to put most of its eggs in that basket. Second, it's nice to have eggs! Since the Obama administration canceled the Constellation program to develop the Ares booster and the Orion crew vehicle (though it subsequently reinstated the Orion part of the program), the United States has been twiddling its thumbs while China has taken great leaps toward the moon and other countries- including Russia, India, and Japan- have to various degrees intensified their own space programs. It would be both tragic and foolhardy for the nation which first…

Robert Elart Waters

,,,is a retired Lutheran minister who, except for his years in the ministry, has been a lifelong political activist who cannot be ideologically pigeonholed. He is a political independent and Neo-Moderate who believes that the incivility of our political discourse and the extremism and ideological rigidity of both political parties threatens our continued existence as a free people.